I know that most families have some sort of tradition for that weekend. My Dad used to paint the house every year. For many, it's the best time for the first pool party of the year. Here in California, it is often the first good weekend to hit the beach. Some people like to catch a baseball game and others enjoy watching the NBA playoffs.
Not us. We have 1,100 miles of auto racing to watch, leading off with the Indianapolis 500. The NASCAR 600 mile race at Charlotte is the nightcap. We take both very seriously.
The yard work is done Saturday, if it is done at all. The chips and dips are stocked a day or two before the races. Dinner changes from year to year, but the volume on the TV can be loud enough to be heard in the kitchen, if the kitchen is used. We have frequently prepared dinner by calling the local pizza take out place on Memorial Sunday.
I video tape the 500 every year. I go back and watch them sometimes and try to figure how things happened or why they happened. I've taped the race for about 27 years now and I still have every tape. Always record the singing of Back home again in Indiana, the sounding of Taps, the national anthem and the command to start the engines. And every year I get the same feeling, an emotional tug that draws me in until the race is over.
I've covered the 500 three times as a journalist and worked the Brickyard 400 three times for Goodyear. I've been through the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum several times and toured the track several times. And yet I get the same feeling watching the ceremonial pre-race activity on television that I get when I drive on to the grounds of the Speedway. I can't tell you why, but it doesn't matter. It happens. The why is unimportant. I have an attachment to the place that just doesn't go away.
Then there is the 600, the NASCAR endurance race that starts in the daylight and finishes after dark. This is another special race, a race that never lacks for drama. You just don't know what is going to happen. I've never worked this race but it is a great event to watch on TV.
Those races are our family tradition on Memorial Day.
Remember my Dad and his house painting? He did that while listening to the 500 on the radio. Sid Collins anchored the coverage. When the race ended, Dad stopped, noted where he was in the process and started in the same spot the following year. This was before the race was on live television and even before ABC began tape delaying the coverage. The house got a lot of paint during races which included rain delays.
In those days, Memorial Day was set for a specific day of the month, not the last Monday. If the race was rained out and had to be run the next day, I was in the cursed position of being in school during the running of the Indianapolis 500. So any guy who showed up with a transistor radio was suddenly a very popular guy.
One year, I'm pretty sure I was in the fifth grade, a theater in Westwood showed the race live via closed circuit technology. We didn't go, but the race was postponed by rain, twice. One guy in my class missed two days of school because his dad refused to waste the money he'd spent buying the tickets to watch the closed circuit race coverage. The kid got back for the last hour or so of school after the race was finally completed. I thought he should have been allowed to give an unscheduled, extra credit oral report so we'd know what happened in the race, but the teacher had no imagination at all and I was reduced to talking non-stop to the guy during class time (and getting in trouble for it) in order to find out what happened in the race.
With that in mind, I guess it is time to tell the story of my Indianapolis 500 experience in May of 1979. The family had a small event to attend on race day, an event I could not get out of. You see, I was due to graduate from San Diego State University that day. This was a bigger upset than the Jets beating the Colts in the Super Bowl, bigger even than the iceberg versus the Titanic. There was no getting out of it, I had to go and that meant missing the race.
Maybe.
As a soon-to-be college graduate, I had new skills, skills honed during years of matriculating through a great American university. I was now a problem solver, equipped with a working knowledge of the very latest technical developments in the world of communications.
And so, while the guest speaker, the Governor of some state somewhere in Mexico, droned on with whatever it was he said on some topic of vast international import (which I didn't care about) during the graduation proceedings, I sat in my assigned spot on the floor of the Aztec Bowl and listened to the radio coverage of the Indianapolis 500 on my brand new transistor radio. Had a little ear piece whose cord I kept under the black graduation robe. It peaked out through my collar and was jammed into my ear.
The only way I knew to change the tassel on my mortar board was when I saw everyone else doing it. I knew it was time to leave when everyone else in my graduating class stood up.
I was officially a college graduate. But, more importantly, I was the only guy in the crowd who knew what happened at the Indianapolis 500 and there was nothing my fifth grade teacher could do about it.
It's Memorial Day. It's 1,100 miles of tradition. And I'll be watching.
Thanks for reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment